ANAXIMANDER. 7°3 



the pitfalls Huxley has warned us against in the opening words of this 

 article. Whoever seeks to understand ancient systems of philosophy 

 must not be misled by ' the similarity of the language of antiquity to 

 modern ideas of expression/ into supposing that the world presented 

 itself to the classic mind under the same aspects, and that problems 

 of nature and of life possessed for it the same significance, as in our 

 day. Our contemplation of the universe has become modified by the 

 sum-total of all the new ideas that have entered into the world during 

 the last two thousand years, and if mental processes have not grown in 

 the meantime more subtle, they have at least a vastly more complex 

 organum to work upon. Speculations during the olden time were cast 

 in a different psychic mold than with us; conceptions rested upon a 

 different basis of fact ; even the simplest words were used in a different 

 significance. As M. Brochard sagely observes : ' C'est une erreur mani- 

 festo que de vouloir retrouver a tout prix chez les anciens nos propres 

 solutions; mais c'est une aussi, est plus repandue encore, de s'imaginer 

 que les questions a resoudre se posaient pour eux exactement comme 

 pour nous.' What we understand now-a-days by the terms matter, 

 motion, space, ether, soul and so on, is not what the corresponding 

 words denoted in the past ages. Nomenclature, with halting gait, is 

 invariably left behind by the onward march of ideas. 



Disparity of modern estimates arises in still larger measure from 

 another cause ; from the attempted* reconstruction of ancient systems 

 of philosophy out of a handful of mutilated excerpts and traditions. 

 Such attempts are almost certainly foredoomed, since the arbitrary 

 nature of ideas precludes the application of a principle of ' correlation 

 of parts,' by means of which the trained expert is enabled to restore 

 missing features from a few characteristic fragments. Efficient as 

 may be the workings of this principle in comparative anatomy, we 

 must not be beguiled by the allurements of Eenanism into transporting 

 it, as some have endeavored to do, from the realm of morphological 

 facts into the realm of ideas. We may be permitted to hazard shrewd 

 guesses here and there, basing them upon the influence of milieu and 

 previous suggestion, or upon contemporary analogy, in the endeavor to 

 revive relics of intellectual progress that ' abode their little hour or two 

 and went their way'; but beyond this we can not go.* 



* For suggestions of contrary nature one may compare the following from 

 Huit's ' Philosophie de la nature chez les anciens' (Paris, 1901) : " Tel penseur 

 de l'antiquite a eu son temps de c6l€brit£: nous n'avons de son systeme qu'une 

 connaissance rudimentaire et tronquee: a 1'imagination et au raisonnement de 

 le reconstruire. De l'oeuvre antique rien ou presque rien n'a surv6cu; qu'a cela 

 ne tienne: sur ces vagues indications, avec autant de hardiesse, mais moins de 

 surety que Cuvier dans ses restitutions palgontologiques, l'esprit creera a 

 nouveau ce qu'une autre pensee avait enfant6 " (p. 208). 



For an illustration of the manner in which suggestions of this nature have 

 been carried out, we may refer to the attempted resuscitation of the doctrines 

 of Empedocles by J. Bidez, the success of which is viewed by Professor Lortzing 



